For those who don't know yet. Apricot is another Open Project starting… this time it’s a game, the Blender and Crystal Space communities joining forces to realize an awesome and industry standard 3D game experience! The plan is to have 6 people for 6 months in Amsterdam working full time on a game. The complete game sources and binaries (for GNU/Linux, Windows, and MacOS/X), artwork, tutorials, documentaries will be made available as a download and as a DVD (more on that below). Everything will be published under the Creative Commons license so you will be able to use the art work and code in your own game.

This project has several goals:

Test and enhance the game pipeline using Blender and Crystal Space.

Extend Blender and Crystal Space to make this possible.

Provide tutorials and documentation for people who want to make their own games.

Have a nice and playable game that will look as if it came out of a commercial game company.

Some of the enhancements in Crystal Space that we are planning for Apricot are:

New advanced character animation system with support for animation blending and more.

New renderer system with support for advanced features that require render to texture and better lighting techniques (dynamic shadows).

In doing so you ensure that we can really keep this project alive for the full six months. Why is this important for you? If you are already a Crystal Space user then this project will make sure Crystal Space gets better and you'll get more documentation and tutorials. If you are not yet a Crystal Space user but you are interested in making a game (Open Source or not) then Apricot will prepare the road for you. It will enable the creation of tools and enhance Blender and Crystal Space so that you will have an easier time creating such a game. And of course, we will try to make the game as fun as possible.